Tag: Requirements Based Testing

At the Brisbane Software Testers Meetup last week there was a group discussion about the requirement to test beyond requirements/acceptance criteria and if you’re doing so, how much is enough? Where do you draw the line? It came from an attendee who had a manager pull him up for a production bug that wasn’t found in testing but wasn’t in the requirements. If it wasn’t in the requirements, how could he test it?

In my opinion, testing purely against requirements or acceptance criteria is never enough. Here’s why.

Imagine you have a set of perfectly formed requirements/acceptance criteria, we’ll represent as this blue blob.

Then you have a perfectly formed software system your team has built represented by this yellow blob

In a perfect, yet non-existent, world, all the requirements/acceptance criteria are covered perfectly by the system, and the system exists of only the requirements/acceptance criteria.

But in the real world there’s never a perfect overlap. There’s requirements/acceptance criteria that are either missed by the system (part A), or met by the system (part B). These can both be easily verified by requirements or acceptance criteria based testing. But most importantly, there are things in your system that are not specified by any requirements or acceptance criteria (part C).

These things in part C often exist of requirements that have been made up (assumptions), as well as implicit and unknown requirements.

The biggest flaw about testing against requirements is that you won’t discover these things in part C as they’re not requirements! But, as shown by the example from the tester meetup, even though something may not be specified as a requirement, the business can think they’re a requirement when it effects usage.

Software development should aim to have as few assumptions, implicit and unknown requirements in a system as reasonably possible. Different businesses, systems and software have different tolerances for how much effort is spent on reducing the size of these unknowns, so there’s no one size fits all answer to how much is enough.

But there are two activities that a tester can perform and champion on a team which can drastically reduce the size of these unknown unknowns.

1 – User Story Kick-Offs: I have only worked on agile software development teams over the last number of years so all functionality that I test is developed in the form of a user story. I have found the best way to reduce the number of unknown requirements in a system is to make sure every user story is kicked-off with a BA, tester and developer (often called The Three Amigos) all present and each acceptance criterion is read aloud and understood by the three. At this point, as a tester, I like to raise items that haven’t been thought of so that these can be specified as acceptance criteria and are unlikely to either make it or not make it into the system by other means or assumptions.

2 – Exploratory Testing: As a tester on an agile team I make time to not only test the acceptance criteria and specific user stories, but to explore the system and understand how the stories fit together and to think of scenarios above and beyond what has been specified. Whilst user stories are good at capturing vertical slices of functionality, their weakness, in my opinion, is they are just a ‘slice’ of functionality and often cross-story requirements may be missed or implied. This is where exploratory testing is great for testing these assumptions and raising any issues that may arise across the system.

Summary

I don’t believe there’s a clear answer to how much testing above and beyond requirements/acceptance criteria is enough. There will always be things in a system that weren’t in the requirements and as a team we should strive to reduce the things that fall into that category as much as possible given the resources and time available. It isn’t just the testers role to either just test requirements or be solely responsible/accountable for requirements that aren’t specified, the team should own this risk.